State system legitimacy, assigned responsibilities, and the moral right to exclude
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Contrary to the conventional view that a state’s moral right to exclude is restricted in various ways but unconditional, it’s been claimed that each state’s possession of such a right depends on the legitimacy of the state system of which it is part. I call this ‘the holistic legitimacy thesis’ (HLT). I argue against it, but defend a different way in which a state’s moral right to exclude is conditional, namely, on its fulfilment of a range of potentially demanding obligations. I do so by drawing upon the assigned responsibilities model of the state system, according to which allocating the world’s population to separate sovereign states, and giving each state primary responsibility for its own citizens, is the most effective way of achieving some relevant threshold of justice. I argue that this model can be supplemented with an account of states’ duties under non-ideal circumstances that coheres with it. Even though the illegitimacy of the state system does not directly undermine or nullify states’ moral right to exclude, the moral defects that make that system illegitimate may indirectly affect an individual state’s moral right to do so since its fulfilment of these duties is a condition on possessing that right. Close
Source: Political Philosophy
DOI: 10.16995/pp.26181
Author: Andrew Mason
Institution: University of Warwick
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Norges Forskningsråd
OpenAlex ID: W7105655574